Jamie Foxx Revealed How He Brought Cameron Diaz out of Retirement
Actor Cameron Diaz felt a lot better after she retired from acting. If it wasn’t for Jamie Foxx, she might’ve stayed retired. But the comedian was the only person who could bring Diaz back to the big screen.
What Jamie Foxx told Cameron Diaz that made her reconsider retirement
Diaz quietly stepped away from the spotlight in 2014. Her last film was Annie, which saw her co-star alongside Foxx. As the years went by, it seemed Diaz was sticking to her retirement. That changed not too long ago, however, when Foxx lured her back with the upcoming Netflix thriller Back In Action. In an interview with ET, the Django Unchained star revealed how he convinced Diaz to return to acting.
“’Do you wanna have some fun? Just have some fun,’” Foxx remembered asking Diaz when pitching the project. “And I think that’s what brought her to it.”
Like many Diaz fans, Foxx is looking forward to her big screen return.
“We miss special moments sometimes, in our business, and I think this is a special moment,” he said. “So we’re so happy that it’s happening and looking forward to it.”
“We had to be very innovative in how we, you know, brought her back,” he added.
But Foxx might not have had to do that much convincing to get Diaz back after all. According to the Mask star herself, Foxx was perhaps the only actor she was willing to come out of retirement for.
“I thought that if I was going to come back and do a movie, the only person I’d come back and do it with would be this guy,” Diaz said in an interview with Empire, referring to Foxx. “Seriously. I had other opportunities along the way and I was always saying, ‘No. I’m not doing it, I’ve told you… What? Jamie asked? Jamie? Oh, I can do a movie with Jamie!”
But Diaz’s casting in Back In Action didn’t mean she was back for good.
“I don’t know how I view it. It’s hard to say,” she said. “If I say it then it becomes this thing. I reserve the right to say no to doing a movie ever again, and I reserve the right to say yes if I decide to. I’m not defining anything. I’m just open to whatever makes sense for me and my family at any given moment.”
Cameron Diaz revealed that acting felt different after coming back
Speaking at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit (via Entertainment Weekly), Diaz explained in a candid interview why she walked away from acting in the first place. The film industry may have been financially rewarding for her, giving the actor her massive net worth. But it wasn’t as personally fulfilling to her as it used to be.
“For me, it was just something I had to do,” she said. “It felt like something I had to do to reclaim my own life. And I just really didn’t care about anything else.”
At the time, she was adamant that no one and nothing would’ve been able to bring her back.
“Nobody’s opinion, nobody’s success, no one’s offer, no one’s anything could change my mind about my decision of taking care of myself and building the life that I really wanted to have,” she added. “It really comes to: What are you passionate about? For me, it was to build my family.”
She spent some of her off time working on her relationship with Benji Madden, who she has 2 children with. After her long hiatus, Diaz admitted she was both nervous and excited about working again. Although she admitted that acting wasn’t the same for her.
“It’s a little bit of muscle memory, you know what I mean? I did that for so long, it’s kind of like the process — I just fell back into it. But it feels a little bit different,” she said on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.
Having Foxx as an on-screen partner also added to her nerves thanks to the energy he usually brought with him on set.
“I’m nervous about that because I have to listen to Jamie, because he will go. He’s like a racehorse,” she said. “I just want to be able to support him along the way.”
